If you think about it, one of the few services left where you have to talk to someone on the phone is the food delivery service. Maybe some of you like that. For the rest of us, there are startups like Just-Eat.Just-Eat, an online takeout ordering service, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $48 million round of funding co-led by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures with substantial support from existing investor Index Ventures.
Founded in Denmark in 2000 and based in London, Just-Eat says order volume has more than doubled in the last year and online orders have grown by 80 percent. With two prominent Silicon Valley venture firms leading the round, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Just-Eat expanding its service stateside, though there has been no official confirmation of this.
“Just-Eat is takeaway the smart way. Our restaurant partners get to tap-in to the exploding e-commerce market and consumers can conveniently access a wide choice of restaurants both online and via their mobiles.” So says Klaus Nyengaard, CEO of Just-Eat, who spices up the announcement’s press release with this little gem: “The investment allows us to keep pace with hungry customer demand across planet Earth and beyond.”
Nyengaard’s company provides online ordering services for 15,000 restaurants in 10 countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom. Five million people visit the network each month. Not only that, but the company claims that it will make $500 million in revenue for local businesses in 2011.
Just-Eat argues that it can make businesses more money because those businesses will be able to process more orders than they ever could over the phone. Instead of having to collect all the information needed for the order, like food items, credit card number and address, the merchant receives this information all at once so it can focus on making and delivering the food.
